Editorial / Éditorial/ Editoryal

English

The struggle for peoples’ liberation has lost three giants these past two years: Hugo Chavez, Nelson Mandela, and Amiri Baraka. In our previous issue, we had paid our respect to Chavez’s departure by republishing the poem of Michel Collon “Hugo Chavez is not dead, he has sowed hope, we are all Chavez! ”* ; and the reporting of the bon mot of Victorin Lurel, French minister of overseas departments representing the French government at Chavez’s funeral in Caracas, who said, “It’s a good thing for the world to have dictators like Chavez.”

In the current issue of the journal, Tontongi pays tribute to Nelson Mandela in the poem “The Passing of Genuine Glory” in which he says of Mandela, “you challenge the light to spread / even in the darkest and deepest abyss.” It includes also a poem by Lenous Suprice in which he says: “you are the bright opening of an echo / in the vegetation of our voices / as alive as an untamed flame / in our struggles for a better light.”

Read also the excellent essay by Alain Saint Victor on Nelson Mandela: “The struggle is my life / The journey of the combatant”.

The readers are invited to enjoy Tontongi’s reportage-collage poem “The Elevation of the Better Barack” in memory of Baraka, a poem that mixes techniques of reportage, essay, poem and memoir.

The enormity of those leaders’ accomplishments makes us often forget that these giants are mortal like ourselves, but when they depart us we realize the great empty hole that their absence has caused, we realize the tremendous sacrifice they consented to make, we realize they had given all of themselves.